Utility companies today have deployed millions of metering devices; at residential, commercial and industrial locations some are smart meters others are not considered smart. These smart meters and the low-tech meters are the “cash registers” of the utility companies since they determine how much electric energy and power are used by their paying customers and allow for accurate billing. Normally, reading meters has been a labor intensive and expensive operation that has to be done on a regular interval basis, and at least monthly.
Our current IT infrastructure is built on the decades old technology of a client-server connection. This has been the norm. However today there is a new innovative system that has supplanted in size, the existing infrastructure by the deployment of billions of wireless connected units that are primarily illustrated by the ubiquitous smartphone and secondarily by other digital electronic devices. There are more than 16 billion such items in use and they provide an untapped computer resource of tremendous size that can be tapped to provide information from a range of sensors. Using this hitherto untapped resource requires a new type of utilization and the subject patent application teaches a practical means for accomplishing this objective.
In the current discussion, the use of this innovative system to provide a means for interacting with utility commodity meters is discussed. For example, in a typical city there are about 1,000,000 residents and approximately 500,000 utility meters. To adequately interact with these meters operationally and obtain actionable data today, a typical utility spends more than $200,000,000 to install and maintain the minimum level of data acquisition with new smart meters in a typical utility-wide metering project. This massive capital investment is recovered by increased utility customer rates. However, at the same time there are approximately 1,000,000 smart devices existing in the same city. These include smart phones, tablets, PCs, game controllers and other types of digitally connected systems. These existing devices can be collectively used as a novel “crowd sourced” means of interacting with utility commodity meters. The existing devices form a crowd sourced medium when coupled with the properly deployed prerequisite software programs on-board which are easily and remotely downloadable digital applications or “apps” as they are commonly called today.
These smart devices and systems are ubiquitous, mobile in most cases, online 24/7, randomly located, well distributed across the total demographic domains and possess exceptional and sufficient computational power to do the job required. This job is done unobtrusively to the device owner, as described herein in this patent application. Further, emerging technologies, known to those skilled in the art, allow these digital devices to interact and connect directly to each other, even when needed bypassing the cellular and established networks. It should he noted that existing legacy utility meter systems have gone in the opposite directions of the current digital technologies. While the digital world has tried to provide widespread smaller, intelligent, ubiquitous solutions to data acquisition, the utilities have deployed expensive “mini-computer” like systems at their meter locations to obtain their usage data. Typical new smart high priced commodity systems range from $250 to $1000 each unit depending on complexity and locations.
The invention described herein with its operational features make the utilization of these devices an excellent solution to the expensive and daunting problem of operationally interacting with these millions of discrete and widely distributed meter locations using a “crowd sourced” approach in which the subject digital devices cooperate to accomplish the task of collecting commodity data on a continuous basis.
Turning now descriptively to the drawings, in which similar reference characters denote similar elements throughout, the figures illustrate the system for managing commodity usage data via digital devices systems of the present invention. The following numbering is used throughout the various drawings.                9 data recording unit        10 digital device types        10a smartphone        1Ob tablet computer        10c PC, laptop or desktop        10d game box controller        10e generic computer module        11 touch screen        12 retrieval unit        13 memory unit        14 calculation unit        15 GPS unit        16 Application program (“App”)        17 communication unit        17a first communication unit        17b second communication unit        18 transmission units        18a, 18b, 18c different types of transmission units        19 sensor units        19a, 19b, 19c different types of sensor units        20 Utility meter        21 Utility server        22a Communication pathway to utility meter        22b Communication pathway to utility server        CPU Central processing unit        IT Information technology        Comm Communication        